Thursday, June 30, 2016
New Report Highlights US Legacy
of Lies on Civilian Drone Deaths
Rights group exposes contradictions between government
statements on civilian casualties and independent reports showing much higher
figures
The figures, which are set to come annually from now on, will
not include details such as names and countries of origin. (Photo: Debra Sweet/flickr/cc)
In anticipation of an impending White House announcement on civilian deaths from
drone strikes, international human rights group Reprieve has released a report
which finds that there is significant evidence the U.S. government is lying
about the human toll of the aerial bombing campaign.
President Barack Obama is expected to announce as early as
Friday that since 2009, U.S. military and CIA airstrikes have inadvertently
killed only about 100 people in nations that are not officially recognized as
battlefields, such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The numbers for
active war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, on the other hand, will not be
included.
But according to Reprieve's report, Opaque
Transparency (pdf), every previous statement made by the
Obama administration on the civilian casualties from drone strikes has been
misleading at best, with some being outright false.
That includes an on-record comment from CIA director John Brennan in
June 2011 that "there hasn't been a single collateral death" in
Pakistan for nearly a year, and a claim from Obama in May 2013 that strikes are
only carried out when there is "near certainty that the target is
present" and "near certainty that noncombatants will not be injured
or killed."
As Reprieve notes, internal CIA documents leaked in 2013 show
that the agency itself recorded a civilian death just two months before
Brennan's comments, while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and other
independent investigators found that dozens of local elders were
killed in a strike in March 2011. As of this February, only 10 drone victims
killed in Pakistan last year had been identified.
The Daily Beast separately noted earlier this month that
the White House's expected estimate of 100 collateral deaths is approximately
one-tenth of the real number, which most independent advocacy groups put at
1,000.
That could be because, as the Intercept revealed last year, the military
posthumously labels its unidentified drone victims as "Enemies Killed in
Action" unless they are proven otherwise.
And the president's own claims that strikes are not carried out
unless there is "near certainty" that noncombatants will not be
killed were similarly contradicted by other internal CIA memos that
"show[ed] that drone operators weren't always certain who they were
killing despite the administration's guarantees," according to McClatchy.
Indeed, in 2015, a group of drone operators turned
whistleblowers accused the administration of allowing
the killings of "innocent civilians" while "lying publicly about
the effectiveness of such a program."
The figures, which are set to come annually from now on, will
not include details such as names and countries of origin. Nor is the
administration expected to explain how it defines its targets. That renders
Friday's announcement virtually meaningless, Reprieve said.
"[I]t has to be asked what bare numbers will mean if they
omit even basic details such as the names of those killed and the areas, even
the countries, they live in," the report states. "[T]he numbers
without the definitions to back up how the Administration is defining its
targets is useless, especially given reports the Obama Administration has shifted
the goalposts on what counts as a ‘civilian’ to such an extent that any
estimate may be far removed from reality."
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Rights, War on Terror
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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